I remember her hair –
Limp like the sky had licked it dry.
I remember ellipse moon fingernails,
Straying from her face, awry.

I remember dove eyes riveted to my own,
Those pale doves in mid-flight.
A face that shadowed its past,
Hands that held me, she held me tight.

She shut her eyes, and I shut mine.

Nine years old, it was in a shaft of ash.
Not a floor above, not a floor below.
Just a button to be home,
One more blink – she would know.

But the lift, it stopped, and hark –
For a man to walk.
In he came, a nameless name.
It was dark, but darkness talks.

An offer for food, was it?
She jerked no, the shaft did too,
dismembered.
His eyes leered close, their color –
Deep, dark, bruised – she still remembered.

Doves flutter open.
She gasps, fazed,
For a moment.
“Go on,” I say, painfully hazed.

She closed her eyes, and I close mine.

An obfuscous blur,
From there on out.
A “scream,” a “shout,”
A helpless bout.

To a corridor on the bottom floor,
Where shadows strip the tiles.
He did the same,
Beat, abused, hurt; nobody to dial.

She winced now, pulled away.
My touch for the thief’s, she mistakes.
For he took what she prizes now,
Innocence, with its pearly wisps –
all was plagued.

So as the elevator panel startled 0, rather red,
The shaft opened us to the world.
And her eyes, they shrink, redolent of a day
When she could do nothing to stop the
violence hurled.

And I remember clasping her shaking back.
I remember telling her,
“You’re safe. You’re safe.
There’s no one when there’s Mother.”

But she remembers most of all.
She remembers knowing nothing at all.
Even when the world was in tumult,
The child, she was a child, after all.

She remembers the shaft of ash.
She remembers that everything was stolen.
For when she tries to shut her eyes,
The world – it pries them open.